histcite

Eugene Garfield has just released HistCite, his bibliometric analysis software. One copy is $199, but you can download a 30 day trial version. I have to say that this would save an awful lot of aggravation in doing citation analyses–I’ve been working on a project where we actually had a Perl programmer design a script to do some of the same stuff HistCite will do. Of course, that is free.

Other than my initial good impression, I have to say that the dependence on only Web of Science data makes this product highly suspect. There is an article in the JMLA I just got in the mail today (not online yet, sorry) that found that Web of Science is almost useless for citation analyses because it doesn’t record citations to web materials or legal information (statutes, laws, cases, etc.).

2 responses to “histcite”

given how much citation analysis depends on the legal literature (which is in fact where it all came from – Shepherd’s Citations may be the mother of it all) that is really weird. Great article in JMLA too!

I am a marine science librarian (IAMSLIC) and I have communicate to a national bibliometrics’ indicators conference in 2005 on the 2004 version of histcite. An executive abstract is available from: http://www.cindoc.csic.es/info/fesabid/27.htm. If anybody would like to examine an english language version report it to me please. I will send it as an attached file.
Very best regards!